


Fear of the dark

by Tabata



Series: Leoverse [12]
Category: Glee
Genre: Fluff, Future Fic, Kid Fic, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-03 23:22:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17887061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata
Summary: Timmy is four and he's insanely afraid of the dark. His father leaves him alone with Leo, who's still recovering from his mental breakdown, to attend a very important dinner meeting. It starts to rain and the light goes off. What could go wrong?





	Fear of the dark

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING:** This story is a **spin-off** for Broken Heart Syndrome. This means that it depicts things happening way late in the 'verse, and that may be on varying degrees of spoiler.
> 
> Written for: COW-T #9  
> Prompt: Darkness

As a kid, Leo was never afraid of the dark. He was afraid of many things – big dogs, snakes, and most of all to be left somewhere and forgotten there forever – but never of the dark. His bedroom was his favorite room of the house and he liked it so much that he had no problem sleeping in it without a nightlight on. It was his reign, the only room of the house Kurt would let him do and redo as much as he wanted, and it had no secrets for him. There was no way a monster could enter and hide itself in the closet without him knowing beforehand. He had a penguin-shaped lamp on the nightstand, but he would never turn it on. He had wanted it because he liked the penguin's face and because it would make funny sounds when you tapped its head, but he had no use for it as a light.

So, as many other things he can't understand in others because he didn't experience them himself, Leo struggles to understand why Timmy is so afraid of the dark. In fact, the kid is not just afraid, sometimes he's scared of it to the point of panic. In his room he has two different nightlights and also a little lamp on his nightstand. The three things together make so much light that it always looks like ten in the morning in there. But that is not enough. The bedroom door also has to be left open, so the light from downstairs can filter in his room too.

Blaine usually waits for him to fall asleep and then patiently goes around the room, turning every single light off except for one, just in case. This is fine, as long as Timmy doesn't wake up in the middle of the night, which happens enough times to be an awful experience for everybody. In the best case scenario, he throws away his blanket, grabs Mr. T-Rex – his pet plastic dinosaur – and makes a run for his father's room to climb on his father's bed, where he proceeds to spend the rest of the night, peaceful and immovable like a little rock. In the worst case scenario, he just screams for his father at the top of his lungs. And Leo – who's sleeping in his own room at the moment, because sleeping with Blaine is still a little bit awkward – usually sits up in the grip of shock, suddenly awake, looking around and wondering what the hell is going on and what is making such a noise. He has spent enough nights in bad places with people that were either very drunk or very high screaming out in confusion that he's got war flashbacks now.

But he can get that. The kid has been uprooted from his hometown and taken away from his family and friends, he's been forced to live with a mentally unstable person he barely knew and who at some point put him in a closet and pretended to forget him there, and most of all he's four, so he's allowed to be a little scared to go to sleep. But the problem is that Timmy's is not afraid only at night, he's afraid whenever there's not enough light. He refuses to cross the hall without running if he can't clearly see every part of it, as far as he's concerned they don't have a basement (and if by any chance one of his toys ends up there, it's dead and it stays there forever) and he's not a big fan of movie theaters either. You either hold his hand throughout the movie and you reassure him that you're still there and you have not been devoured by the monsters living in the darkness or you must be ready to go home mid-movie.

Leo is not sure what Timmy would do if it was night outside and the light would suddenly go off and he's not even too eager to find out, but of course life is unfair and that's exactly what happens.

Blaine still doesn't leave Timmy with him with a light heart, and Leo doesn't really blame him for that. Regardless of the closet incident, Leo is still very unwell. His meds make him groggy and some days just being awake is so exhausting that he has no strength left to do anything else. In addition to that, his emotions are all over the place and most of the time he can't control them. He's mostly serene – happy would be asking too much – but sometimes he's really not, and those are bad days. He can be very sad and cry all day or he can be very angry and start screaming and throwing things. Or he can get panic attacks, which are the worst and leave him sitting in a corner on the floor, shaking like a leaf. In any of these cases he wouldn't be fit to take care of a child. That is why Blaine always tries to be in the house, to look after Timmy, of course, but also to look after him.

Tonight he has a dinner meeting, though, and he can't refuse to go as he's the only one in the house with a job and he can't really afford to lose it. At first, he thought of hosting the dinner in the house, with all the risks that that would entail – a little kid running around and bothering his guests, a twenty-two years old having a random breakdown and destroying the living room – but Dottie, his agent, talked him out of it. One, it was really too risky. Two, she wasn't going to invite two producers and a stage director to his house and discuss business over a home-cooked dinner. So, she booked the private dining room at the Old City Prime – which is not even close to the restaurant they should be having this dinner in, but at least it's decent – and that's where Blaine is going to be tonight.

“I have left you all the information you might need on the fridge,” Blaine says, checking himself in the mirror one more time. He's wearing Gucci tonight and he looks stunning, but he's so nervous he can't even appreciate his own handsome reflection, which is bad because a little narcissism and his usual self-confidence would work wonders at this dinner. “And you have mine and Dottie's number already.” 

“Yes,” Leo confirms, softly. He's been milling about him awkwardly hugging himself since Blaine got out of the shower.

“Timmy already had his dinner,” Blaine continues, “so you only need to put him to bed. Read him something. Ask him what story he wants you to read, he likes to choose. He'll be asleep halfway through, anyway. At that point, baby, please, don't go back downstairs, alright? You can go in my room if you want, play some video games. Just, stay around, so if he needs something, he can call—Leo?”

Leo is looking a little lost at him. It's so clear that he's worried but he doesn't want to tell him that Blaine feels moved. It's been a while since Leo willingly refrained from putting yet another weight on his shoulders. “Baby, you'll be fine,” he tells him.

“I guess,” Leo says, uncertainty in his voice. 

Blaine offers him an encouraging smile, holding his face in his hands. “I'll be away two hours, three at best,” he reminds him. “And Timmy will be asleep for most of the time. You have nothing to worry about. I trust you.”

Leo looks up at him to read the lie on his face, but Blaine promised him to always say the truth to him from now on and Leo finds him smiling confidently. He really believes Leo can do it. “Alright,” he sighs, not as enthusiastically as Blaine was hoping for, but at least ready to face the challenge of getting through this evening alone with Timmy, which is more than he's done in the past few weeks. “Read to him, put him to bed, stay upstairs. Got it.”

Blaine smiles again and leaves a kiss on his forehead as it's still too soon for anything else. “I'll better go,” he announces. “Dottie said she's going to kill me if I'm late, and I think she will really do it.”

He puts his coat on, says bye to Timmy one more time – the kid doesn't seem too upset to see him go and to have to stay at home with Leo, which is encouraging – and then he's gone. The house is suddenly too silent as Leo watches the now closed door and Timmy watches him. “Can we play a little before bed?” Timmy finally says, in his tiny voice.

“Hm?” Leo looks down at him and he reminds himself that he has to focus and give what little attention he has to the kid. “Sure. But put your pajamas on and brush your teeth first.” That sounds like something reasonable to say.

“Yes!” Timmy nods and runs upstairs, holding Mr. T-Rex under his arm, and Leo follows him slowly. He doesn't rush anywhere these days. Luckily, Blaine is raising Timmy to be very independent. The kid has known how to dress and wash himself without help since he was very little. Leo only has to check in on him to see if everything is alright. 

Ten minutes later, Timmy is wearing yellow kangaroo-themed pajamas and he's bouncing on the bed like one, clearly too euphoric to be ready to sleep. “Leo! Leo! Can we do a puzzle? Please!”

A puzzle seems a great idea. “Which one do you wanna do?”

“The mermaid!” Timmy says, quite obviously. He's been doing that specif puzzle for weeks. He's obsessed with it and with the sea in general.

When Blaine moved to Lima to take care of Leo, he bought this big house that had a bedroom for Leo and, obviously, one for his son too. And, since he felt guilty for having moved Timmy away from Westerville, he tried to make up for it by letting his son decorate his own room. Timmy had chosen a pirate theme: a bed that looks like a pirate ship, a treasure chest, a lot of parrots and even a set of fake wooden swords that you can keep on the wall or take down to play with. Blaine claims that it's just a phase and that Leo went through it as well when he was about eight or nine – that he wanted to be a pirate and meet the sirens and find treasures on desert islands – even though Leo has no memory of it.

The mermaid puzzle is kept neatly in its box on the short bookcase that's in the room, because Blaine is that kind of super tidy father that finds a place for everything and asks his son to put back a toy before choosing another one. It's a 48-pieces puzzle and it shows a young mermaid with a pink and purple scaled tail playing among the corals with a bunch of tiny animal friends. Leo opens the box and they decide to use the lid of it as a table.

Meanwhile, it's raining so much outside that it's hard to see the street through the window, but they don't notice that because Timmy is too focused on the puzzle and on the story of the mermaid Leo is making up for him on the spot. They are twenty pieces in, busy making the frame, when a loud thunder seems to take away the light, and Timmy screams. It's not a normal scream, it's a panicked screech that pierces the sudden darkness like a siren. The kid has gone in full-hysteric mode.

Leo experiences a full five seconds of panic himself, not because of the darkness but because of the kid. He genuinely doesn't know what to do and yet he knows he has to do _something_ because if Timmy screams any longer, his brain will shut down and there's no telling what will happen. “Alright, alright, Timmy, calm down,” he says as gently as he can, while he reaches forward to try and get a hold of his flailing hands. “It's okay. The light went off.”

“It's dark!” The kid screams again. He's sobbing so desperately already that his voice is all broken and shaking.

“I know, Timmy.” Leo stands up and tries to orient himself in the dark room. The streetlamps went off too, so there's no light coming from outside either. Then, he remembers he has a flashlight on his phone and he turns it on. “I need to go to the basement to turn on the light again.”

“No!” Timmy screams louder. “I don't wanna stay here alone.”

“Do you wanna come with me, then?”

“No!”

“Alright, we can wait here until your dad come back,” Leo suggests.

“No!”

Leo takes a deep breath and counts to ten, slowly breathing in and out, trying to ignore the current disruptive element – the loud human siren screaming his head off right next to him – like Dr. Williams, his therapist, taught him to do. That's when he gets the idea. Some time ago he read something on the internet that looked pretty stupid and had no real use for him at the time, but it could be exactly what he needs now.

“Timmy,” he calls him, “I need you to listen to me very carefully. We are going to go in the kitchen now, because there's a powerful weapon there that I need to get.”

That seems to make him curious enough to at least stop crying. “What weapon?” He hiccups.

“You'll see it when we get there,” Leo says, trying to speak like he really means business. He points his phone at the wall until he finds the swords rack and he takes one of them down. “You take this.”

He gives Timmy his sword and the kid's tiny hand automatically closes around the hilt. “What's for?” He hiccups again.

“Pirates are armed everywhere they go,” Leo reminds him as he leaves the room, holding him by his hand. 

There's a big part of him that hopes for the light to come back by itself, but if it doesn't, he's got a plan now. It takes them a lot of time to get to the kitchen – partially because Timmy is scared of every shadow and partially because Leo is scared the kid will fall down the stairs and break his neck on his watch – but they get there. First of all, Leo walks around the room with Timmy holding the back of his t-shirt and following his every step, and he rummages in every drawer to look for the real flashlight he knows Blaine keeps in there.

“Here, hold this,” he instructs the kid, when he finds it. It is way better than the one on his phone. “Make some light for me.”

The kid obediently points the flashlight towards him and watches him as he grabs an empty spray bottle from under the sink, something that's been there since Blaine decided he was going to have some plants in the house and water them personally. Needless to say he never did. “What are you doing?” Timmy asks.

“Making us invincible,” Leo answers as he fills up the bottle with water and a couple of drops of lemon scented dish soap. He shakes the bottle energetically and then shows it to Timmy, who looks very confused.

“What is it?”

“This, my friend, it's an anti-monster spray,” he explains with the self-confidence of a salesman interrupting your dinner to sell you the latest model of a vacuum cleaner. “One spray of this and dark places are safe. The monsters hate it. It also works on witches, aliens and bad dreams.”

“Are you sure?” Timmy asks, hesitantly.

“Oh, I'm very sure. In fact, I've been using it myself since I was your age,” Leo nods. “That's why I'm not afraid of the dark, because I know how to use my anti-monster spray. Now, try it out. Aim it right in front of you and spray.”

Timmy looks both perplexed and intrigued. He puts down the flashlight and the wooden sword – suddenly more interested in how the anti-monster spray works than in the dangerous and scary darkness – and holds the spray bottle with both hands like he would do with a very big gun. He even pulls the trigger with his eyes closed. The air fills instantly with lemon scent.

“Very good,” Leo says. “Another one, for good measure.”

“Take this! Pew! Pew!” This time Timmy sprays twice and with his eyes wide open, facing bravely the darkness in front of him. 

“I must say, you are a natural,” Leo compliments him. “One last thing and we're ready to go turn on the light.” Leo opens two different cabinets and grabs a large bowl and a colander. He puts the former on his head and the latter on Timmy's. “Now we're completely protected.”

Timmy feels the huge colander on his head and must find it suitable because he nods. “Yes! Let's go kick some bums!”

Leo chuckles. “Yeah, let's go kick some _bums_ ,” he agrees.

They make their way towards the basement: Timmy in the front, swinging his sword right and left and spraying everything every two steps, and Leo right behind him, making light for him with the flashlight. Once they reach the door, Timmy offers to stand guard – which is a good way not to say he doesn't want to go down there – and Leo leaves him there, spray bottle at the ready.

“How long will it take?” Timmy asks, spraying, as Leo climbs down the steep steps.

“Two minutes top,” Leo answers. “How's the situation up there?”

Timmy sprays. “No monsters.”

“Good. I'm almost there,” Leo informs him. He's never been in the basement of this house before, because it's Blaine who deals with these kind of things – or any kind of things, really – but he knows there must be a switch box somewhere. He makes light with his phone, having left the flashlight with Timmy, and he finds it at the end of the room, right next to the water heater. He has seen this exact scene in a hundred of horror movies. If some evil presence, alien monster, horrible mutation or psycho cannibal killer has to come out and kill him, it's going to happen now. But nothing happens, obviously, and he can easily turn on the light again with the flip of a finger. 

“We did it!” Timmy cries out in joy upstairs, and Leo feels a little happy too.

*

Three hours later, Blaine comes back to a dark and peaceful house, which is unquestionably a good sign but still makes him a little nervous because there was a time not long ago when silence was the harbinger of horrible things. If Leo was silent, he was either raging inside and ready to explode in the most spectacular way or he was ignoring him, which was even worse. To deal with him screaming and growling like an animal was always easier because at least it meant he was still feeling _something_.

He takes off his coat and goes upstairs, trying to make as less noise as possible. He finds his son sleeping in his naval bed and Leo in his own room, still fully dressed and sleeping on an armchair, in a weird folded position, not unlike the young kid in the other room. He's drooling on his portable console, the sign _stage complete_ blinking on the screen.

Blaine shakes him awake, gently. “Hey,” he smiles at him when Leo finally finds the strength to open his eyes.

“You're back,” he notices, speaking like someone who deep down was afraid it wasn't gonna happen.

“That I am,” Blaine smiles again and combs Leo's hair backwards. “Is everything fine? Why are you not in your bed?”

“I was waiting, in case he needed me,” he mumbles, a yawn forcing his mouth wide open.

“I see,” Blaine chuckles. “And can you explain to me why the house smells like lemon, my son is sleeping with a colander on his head and there's a spray bottle on his nightstand?”

“We fought monsters,” Leo says with conviction, but still totally half-asleep. “And we won.”

Blaine can't help but laugh. Leo's words don't make any sense but, for once, that doesn't seem a problem at all because his son is alive, the house is still standing and the other kid in his life is fine too. He helps Leo stand up and leads him towards his bed. “Alright, kiddo, you'll tell me everything about it tomorrow,” he says, pulling back his blankets for him.

Leo nods as he lets himself go on the bed, clearly pajamas are out of the question tonight. “Yes, tomorrow. Did you get the part?” He asks, softly.

“I did,” Blaine smiles, kissing him on his head.

Leo smiles. “We're fine, then.”

“We're fine.”


End file.
